Julian Farino, the director of controversial new movie The Oranges, tells Marc
Lee why Hugh Laurie was his only choice for the lead role.

There should be no doubt that Hugh Laurie is one of the best-known, most highly regarded actors in the world. The US television drama series House, in which he played an irascible, drug-addicted but brilliant hospital doctor, was acclaimed by critics, won awards by the armful and entertained audiences in more than 60 countries. At the height of its popularity, House was the most watched TV show on the planet.

And just to confirm his star status, when Laurie’s first post-House film, The Oranges, had its premiere at the Toronto film festival, hundreds of fans gathered outside the cinema just to catch a glimpse of him. Not something that normally happens at Toronto, which eschews the glitz and glamour of, say, Cannes.

When the director of The Oranges, Julian Farino, saw the crowd clamouring for Laurie’s autograph, it gave him a particularly good feeling: he had been vindicated in his choice of leading man. Because there had been doubts in some quarters about Laurie’s suitability for the role.

“I felt I’d spent two years having to fight for Hugh to do the movie,” says Farino, “with people saying, 'He’s not a movie star’, and then, at the premiere, all these fans turn out to see him.”

Farino — a fellow Brit — had wanted Laurie from the moment he knew he was going to direct The Oranges, but he came under a lot of pressure to cast a more bankable Hollywood star. “There’s a lot more crossover now because so much great material is coming out of cable TV channels such as HBO, but there’s still a divide in America between television and movie stars. The first film company that owned The Oranges would have had me cast someone like Bruce Willis or Richard Gere, because it makes the movie easier to sell around the world.”

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Farino was so determined to get Laurie that he allowed 18 months to pass between their first meeting and the start of shooting — a daring gamble. “I almost got fired because people were saying I couldn’t cast the movie, and I said, 'Well, actually I have cast the movie, but I have to hang on and wait for Hugh.’ There was a lot of pressure on me to meet other actors.”

Farino knew from the start that the success of the film, a comedy drama, was going to depend on Laurie’s particular skills as an actor — simply because of the sensitivity of the subject matter. The Oranges is the story of two fifty-ish couples, David and Paige (Laurie and Catherine Keener) and Terry and Cathy (Oliver Platt and Allison Janney), who have been friends for decades and have houses opposite each other in an affluent New Jersey suburb. However, their comfortable middle-class lives are blown apart when David, stifled by an increasingly cheerless marriage, embarks on an affair with Terry and Cathy’s 24-year-old daughter, Nina (Leighton Meester).

Despite the pain caused to all those around the pair, Farino did not want audiences to leap to obvious moral judgments about the relationship.

“The premise of the movie,” says Farino, “was never really an issue for me, and I don’t expect it will be for a European audience, but it became a kind of burden in the States, the idea of an older man/younger woman relationship that breaks up two families. Not casting judgment on it was fundamentally harder for an American audience than I’d realised. I always thought of the story as very warm and welcoming. It’s a dark premise but not a dark movie.

“The writers [Jay Reiss and Ian Helfer] told me that when they’d shown the first draft of the script to their wives, they both got the feedback that it was repugnant, that they’d just made David’s character unpleasant, and how do you not blame him for what he does? When Hugh’s name came up, I stubbornly hung on for him because he has a fundamental decency that means you weren’t going to see him as a predatory middle-aged man in a familiar crisis of reasserting his sexuality.

“When David first opens the door to Nina [after she has been living away for some time], if for one second you thought he was thinking, 'She’s got pretty hot’, the story is dead, frankly. You have to believe that his struggle is an honest one with himself and isn’t in any way predatory. Being able to suggest that is something Hugh can do.”

Laurie’s belief in the film’s integrity was demonstrated at a Q&A session following the Toronto screening. “A lot of love was showered on the film by the audience,” says Farino, “but there was one hater — as there always is. This woman stood up and said how could we make a movie that’s so morally bankrupt. I did my best to explain that I felt it was a generous view of human beings.

“But then Hugh presented a very passionate, eloquent, off-the-cuff argument about how that woman’s opinion was precisely the reason he’d wanted to do the movie — because it was always going to be easy to have a particular opinion of a relationship like David and Nina’s, but the whole point of the movie was to transcend that. It was about forgiveness and about suspending ready judgment of people.”

Farino, 51, and Laurie, 53, have followed similar career trajectories. Both were at Cambridge at about the same time (though they never met), and then established careers in British television, Laurie as a comedy actor in series such as Jeeves and Wooster, A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Blackadder, Farino as a director of documentaries and drama, including a stint on Coronation Street. They then both found success in American TV, Laurie in House (which ended earlier this year) and Farino in a number of long-running series, including Sex and the City, Entourage and, most recently, How to Make It in America.

As a Brit, how comfortable is Farino working on such specifically American shows?

“Well, I would never presume to tell Americans what they are like. Entourage [about a rising twentysomething film star and his coterie of three childhood friends] is the quintessential LA show. As a director, you go in with the same broad approach as you would with a documentary: what’s this world about? What’s underneath? With Entourage, all I tried to do was to make you feel that those four blokes had been together since they were 10 years old.

“And with The Oranges, though it’s set in New Jersey in a very American world, it could be in suburbia anywhere. We can all recognise mother-daughter relationships, or dads who spend a lot of time in the shed, or children who grew up together because their families were best friends. You always look for the universal.”

That said, could he imagine an American directing Corrie?

“Good question. I would be immensely surprised if it happened because it’s such a landlocked world, so identifiably north of England. It would be rather strange, wouldn’t it? But then I may be wrong.”